Folks,

Sorry for the delay in posting here about this but I wanted to make sure I had all the facts before jumping into this issue.

1) Regarding the Fortress Lords and Guards - Unfortunately, they weren't set up with their proper abilities in the current build and as such, were a lot easier to kill than they should have been. That error has already been corrected. These guys were supposed to be difficult to kill in their own right but in the last version, they were able to knocked out with a weak left. :)

2) Banker/AH missing in the refugee camp - Losing a city is not supposed to be fun. It is intended to hurt but not give players a reason not to log in while their city is contested/sacked. Both of these guys were supposed to immediately spawn and stay in place in the camp when a city is in the contested/sacked state. Obviously they didn't (or they did and then they vanished) and this will be corrected. Again, keep in mind that we want people to defend their city and we will provide incentives (more on this later) and disincentives for doing so or failing to do so.

3) I want to help defend the city but I'm too low! Yeap, unfortunately that's correct. Cities were meant to be defended by players above level 30. If we allow all players to defend their cities in the instances, they might be taking a spot from a higher level player who has a better chance to succeed. We will talk about this more in the office next week but right now, we don't see the need to change this.

4) As to the 48x48 instances, we will look at upping the size of the instances as we make more improvements/tweaks to the engine. We want these battles to be fun and while we could easily make them 200x200 code/design wise, the strain that it would put on a large percentage of machines would make it a lot less fun for those people.

5) Apparently a banker, AH, etc. found their way to the War Quarters. They were not supposed to be there in the first place and we will correct that.

6) Altdorf was level 5 after the attack - It should be, the city was defended successfully.

7) The notion that the overpopulated side wins every time - This is simply not true under most conditions. If your realm refuses to defend its own city, well, yes, you will lose as you should. This is an RvR game and if your side won't defend their own realm, they deserve to lose. Based on the realm ratios we have seen on all our servers, any imbalance on the servers so far would not come close to guaranteeing success for that realm.

8) I saw lots of destruction teams running through undefended instances and they were scoring like crazy! - Not according to our numbers. Players can run these instances if there are no defenders because that is one of the points of being there. How boring would it be to work your way up there and have to sit around and do nothing because the other side isn't there? So, we let them run instances and contribute to the Victory Points but their contribution is very small. We'll recheck those numbers again this week but from what we've seen so far, the contribution was as small as it should have been.

9) Late night/early morning raids suck - Yeap, but that's part of this type of game. We either say no city capture during certain hours or leave it up to the players. Since players get organized at different times of the day, we're going to leave it as it is especially since your side can do the same things to them. OTOH, we have tweaked the mechanics for zone capture so that it will be even harder to pull off the early a.m. attacks. This will be part of the next patch.

10) Altdorf was never captured but merely contested. The defenders did a great job and held them off. Also, we will be making some changes in the coming weeks so that the defenders will get new goodies for successfully defending their city. This should serve as more encouragement for doing your civic duty.

11) The city was contested for 24 hours, is that working as intended? - No, it was a bug. An attack/defense was never supposed to last that long. It will be fixed in the next version of the game. As to what the time is, we'll still talking about it. It was supposed to be 1/2 of that time but even that may be too long, we'll see.

12) Why are PQs part of the city sieges? - We talked about this in beta but once a city is captured the attackers will participate in PQs that will help determine how long the city will be theirs to enjoy. If they do those PQs well, they will get to hold the city for a longer period of time.

13) Reikland was taken very quickly - We're looking into this, it certainly sounds like a bug, that is not how it is supposed to work.

Okay, so that's my wall of text on the siege of Altdorf. What it boils down to is that this is an RvR-centric game and people will have to come to the defense of their city if they want to keep it. We're constantly tweaking the numbers and the mechanics so that it doesn't boil down to a pure numbers game (3-1 advantage = auto win!) but if people want to participate in an RvR game then they have to expect to lose their city if their realm won't defend it. Cities are intended to be taken but not as quickly as Altdorf was contested (not captured) this time and they are not intended to be lost during a quick early morning zerg we'll continue to tweak the mechanics so it isn't. As we've said before, taking a city is supposed to be a complicated undertaking and even though Altdorf entered a contested state, it wasn't lost.

Mark